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Hamas/Israel conflict: news and discussion

Horrible images though I've tried not to seek them out. Murdering people at a music festival ffs. I hope the hostages are being treated with some dignity. Practically (but also fantastically) I'd hope something could be negotiated to get the red cross/crescent or someone in to maybe stem some of the abuses.

Sadly, Hamas are doing what has been shown to work (to a point) for them in the past. Horrific violence focuses attention on the conflict, the inevitable massive Israeli retaliation elicits sympathy and hostage taking has paid dividends for them. Perceived resistance also has made them popular with Palestinians in the past even when it has involved atrocities.

Another issue is that even if both sides stopped the tit for tat cycle of atrocities then Palestinians will continue to die due to the occupation as they do between all the televised horror shows and during the ceasefires. What would be the means by which Palestinians could continue to resist the occupation and improve their lot?
 
Aladdin said:
Sexual violence has been around longer than either of those religions.
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Yes, but sexually conservative societies, where that conservatism is driven by both material factors (famines resulting in a need to regulate population growth) and ideological factors (religious ideologies that mandate inequality between the sexes and the sexual double standard, etc.) are more likely to produce that mentality. You must know Irishmen who went to religious-run boys' schools in the 1980s, surely?
 
likesfish said:
Israel seems to be a treated as a total atrocity machine
while Saudi and Iran and Syria get excuses made or just ignored when they commit atrocitys
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The crimes of the Iranian Dictatorship have received a lot of coverage over the past year and before compassion fatigue and boredom set in so did Syria. It's places like Mali or Manipur and others that we aren't even aware of where we ignore the oppression.

www.google.com

Horrific stories emerge as thousands flee ethnic violence in north-east India

People fleeing unrest in Manipur tell of mobs attacking villages, setting fire to homes and looting
www.google.com www.google.com
 
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Idris2002 said:
Yes, but sexually conservative societies, where that conservatism is driven by both material factors (famines resulting in a need to regulate population growth) and ideological factors (religious ideologies that mandate inequality between the sexes and the sexual double standard, etc.) are more likely to produce that mentality. You must know Irishmen who went to religious-run boys' schools in the 1980s, surely?
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Look..I'm not saying they didnt sexually assault kids. They did. It was and is wrong. Despicable. Shameful. They deserve to be strung up and castrated in my mind!! But blaming it on "Christianity" is not exactly fair. Men have raped and assaulted boys and girls and women for millenia regardless of religion.
These men should never have had access to children. I would go so far as to say that these men were only there because they had access to children. The biggest failure of Irish children was the fact that when it all came to light the Church was very slow to support the victims and acted to protect and move around the perpetrators in a blind stupid "we don't judge people" move that served to ridicule the real motives of Chritianity .. those being to protect the innocent amd do no harm But you've pretty much tried to tar all Christians as rapists and pedophiles and you surely know that is not accurate?
 
Aladdin said:
Look..I'm not saying men didnt sexually assault kids. They did. It was and is wrong. Despicable. Shameful. They deserve to be strung up and castrated in my mind!! But blaming it on "Christianity" is not exactly fair. Men have raped and assaulted boys and girls and women for millenia regardless of religion.
These men should never have had access to children. I would go so far as to say that these men were only there because they had access to children. But you've pretty much tried to tar all Christians as rapists and pedophiles and you surely know that is not accurate?
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Either I'm not making myself clear, or you're misinterpreting me, or both. I'm not saying that once you've become, or been raised as, a religious believer, you're on the way to being a person of that kind. I am saying that with their sexual double standards, etc., you are more likely to get young men, who, given certain circumstances, will be more capable of committing acts of sexual violence than others.
 
Spymaster said:
There are people on this thread expressing pretty much the same sentiment.

There are a couple of topics on which certain elements of the far left are absolutely fucking insane.

Israel is one of them.
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The order it seems to have been going in for some people I've seen online is something like:
  1. It didn't happen
  2. Ok, maybe it did happen but it wasn't as bad as is being reported
  3. It's as bad as reported but the victims were probably old enough to be in the IDF
  4. Ok well maybe some of them weren't in the IDF, but what were they doing in Israel anyway?
  5. Yes, lots of innocent people were killed, but have you considered that the Israeli state also does bad things?
I have absolutely no problem at all with criticism of the Israeli state for the evil shit they do, and a wider discussion of the long term causes of the conflict, but when the very first reaction of people online is not one of complete horror and contempt for the perpetrators of the atrocities, but to immediately jump to one of the above stages of denial/excuses, it makes me question the humanity of fellow people on the left. Comments on this thread like 'Palestinians have the right to try to end the occupation', 'Fuck yes! I could weep, I'm so delighted'.

Guess what, massacring 250 young adults at a music festival, executing civilians in the street and in their homes, and taking young children hostage, all backed by a despotic regime in Iran, isn't going to end the occupation. It isn't going to help Palestinians break out of their prison. It isn't going to break the cycle of decades of senseless violence. And it sure as hell isn't going to save the lives of the innocent Palestinians currently lying under the rubble of buildings hit by Israeli airstrikes.
 
Idris2002 said:
Either I'm not making myself clear, or you're misinterpreting me, or both. I'm not saying that once you've become, or been raised as, a religious believer, you're on the way to being a person of that kind. I am saying that with their sexual double standards, etc., you are more likely to get young men, who, given certain circumstances, will be more capable of committing acts of sexual violence than others.
Click to expand...

Idris to be fair the above could be labelled in all of the Abraham religions so bit an odd tangent to be going down..
 
Ax^ said:
Idris to be fair the above could be labelled in all of the Abraham religions so bit an odd tangent to be going down..
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Yes, that's my point - this kind of sexual conservatism producing dodgy young men is common to all the Abrahamic religions. Which is how you get acts of sexual violence by all parties in the Irish revolution a century ago, for example. I don't see how this is a tangent: I think it's quite central to the issue. The cheerleaders who want to dismiss even the possibility that their noble freedom fighters might have blots on their copybook are not helping, to put it mildly.

For the reasons strung out gives above, this new turn down the spiral isn't going to make things better, it's not going to win back even one inch of Palestinian ground, it's just going to get a lot of innocent people killed - or worse.
 
Idris2002 said:
Yes, that's my point - this kind of sexual conservatism producing dodgy young men is common to all the Abrahamic religions. Which is how you get acts of sexual violence by all parties in the Irish revolution a century ago, for example. I don't see how this is a tangent: I think it's quite central to the issue. The cheerleaders who want to dismiss even the possibility that their noble freedom fighters might have blots on their copybook are not helping, to put it mildly.

For the reasons strung out gives above, this new turn down the spiral isn't going to make things better, it's not going to win back even one inch of Palestinian ground, it's just going to get a lot of innocent people killed - or worse.
Click to expand...
i'm sure we'd all like to see warfare played out with queensberry rules but everyone knows that that's not the way it is. for me, you're arguing a case which is inherent in any forms of collective / mass violence, namely that they're going to be problematic be they slave revolts in roman times, slave revolts in the americas, insurrections, revolutionary situations or whatnot. it's nothing imo to do with religion abrahamic or otherwise and much more to do with power and the sudden ability to unleash violence against those - the population - which has previously meted out violence against the powerless.
 
Idris2002 said:
Either I'm not making myself clear, or you're misinterpreting me, or both. I'm not saying that once you've become, or been raised as, a religious believer, you're on the way to being a person of that kind. I am saying that with their sexual double standards, etc., you are more likely to get young men, who, given certain circumstances, will be more capable of committing acts of sexual violence than others.
Click to expand...
Idris2002 .
Idris2002 said:
Yes, that's my point - this kind of sexual conservatism producing dodgy young men is common to all the Abrahamic religions. Which is how you get acts of sexual violence by all parties in the Irish revolution a century ago, for example. I don't see how this is a tangent: I think it's quite central to the issue. The cheerleaders who want to dismiss even the possibility that their noble freedom fighters might have blots on their copybook are not helping, to put it mildly.

For the reasons strung out gives above, this new turn down the spiral isn't going to make things better, it's not going to win back even one inch of Palestinian ground, it's just going to get a lot of innocent people killed - or worse.
Click to expand...
I'm not cheerleading freedom fighters? And I think in the case of the civil war in Ireland, everyone was stuck having to choose a side or get out of the country.. DeValera fucked everyone over by refusing to accept democratic process and walking out of the dail. But you've decided that Irish men in the civil war were all rapists. I would say men of all and no religion in any war can and do rape... not all men. Some men.
 
strung out said:
Guess what, massacring 250 young adults at a music festival, executing civilians in the street and in their homes, and taking young children hostage, all backed by a despotic regime in Iran, isn't going to end the occupation. It isn't going to help Palestinians break out of their prison. It isn't going to break the cycle of decades of senseless violence. And it sure as hell isn't going to save the lives of the innocent Palestinians currently lying under the rubble of buildings hit by Israeli airstrikes.
Click to expand...
This^. But we no longer live in an age of nuance. It is possible to decouple support for some kind of solution to the seemingly intractable conflict from a form of support for resistance against Israel, though finding both the words and tone isn't easy.
 
strung out said:
The order it seems to have been going in for some people I've seen online is something like:
  1. It didn't happen
  2. Ok, maybe it did happen but it wasn't as bad as is being reported
  3. It's as bad as reported but the victims were probably old enough to be in the IDF
  4. Ok well maybe some of them weren't in the IDF, but what were they doing in Israel anyway?
  5. Yes, lots of innocent people were killed, but have you considered that the Israeli state also does bad things?
I have absolutely no problem at all with criticism of the Israeli state for the evil shit they do, and a wider discussion of the long term causes of the conflict, but when the very first reaction of people online is not one of complete horror and contempt for the perpetrators of the atrocities, but to immediately jump to one of the above stages of denial/excuses, it makes me question the humanity of fellow people on the left. Comments on this thread like 'Palestinians have the right to try to end the occupation', 'Fuck yes! I could weep, I'm so delighted'.

Guess what, massacring 250 young adults at a music festival, executing civilians in the street and in their homes, and taking young children hostage, all backed by a despotic regime in Iran, isn't going to end the occupation. It isn't going to help Palestinians break out of their prison. It isn't going to break the cycle of decades of senseless violence. And it sure as hell isn't going to save the lives of the innocent Palestinians currently lying under the rubble of buildings hit by Israeli airstrikes.
Click to expand...

Peak example of dogshit "left" reasoning here. Notice the conflation between repelling an invading army who are massacring civilians and the act of massacring hundreds of civilians. Both are just 'resisting occupation' (but one is bad because it is a 'proxy' for NATO, the other one being a proxy for Iran is fine though apparently)

 
Jeff Robinson said:
Peak example of dogshit "left" reasoning here. Notice the conflation between repelling an invading army who are massacring civilians and the act of massacring hundreds of civilians. Both are just 'resisting occupation' (but one is bad because it is a 'proxy' for NATO, the other one being a proxy for Iran is fine though apparently)

Click to expand...


Precisely the same reasoning has been voiced on this thread.

Proper, screaming "left" lunacy that totally alienates swathes of otherwise sympathetic people.
 
200 Israelites dead
“oh it’s terrible but the Israeli state has…”

No you just need to say it’s terrible, we know (especially here) how horrifically the Israeli state acts towards Palestine. Running amok and shooting and unarmed civilians isn’t fighting back it’s murder plain and simple.
 
Artaxerxes said:
200 Israelites dead
“oh it’s terrible but the Israeli state has…”

No you just need to say it’s terrible, we know (especially here) how horrifically the Israeli state acts towards Palestine. Running amok and shooting and unarmed civilians isn’t fighting back it’s murder plain and simple.
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Would it count as fighting back if it had been a bit gentler?
 
Artaxerxes said:
200 Israelites dead
“oh it’s terrible but the Israeli state has…”
Click to expand...

Many of the takes I'm reading are even worse, either celebrating the attacks on civilians or refusing to criticise them, Corbyn sadly has gone down the latter path.

I just don't get why people are incapable of opposing both Israel and Hamas massacring civilians AND calling for justice for Palestine. How ideologically blinkered do you have to be to struggle to condemn massacring children at a music festival?! I wonder how many of these same people struggled to do the same in relation to the 2017 massacre of children at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester?
 
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